Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

PSearch: NACS and ICS Collaborate

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PSearch

Faculty and staff now have a powerful new tool for finding contacts through UCI’s online phone directory.  PSearch melds the directory data NACS maintains with state-of-the-art database research from the lab of ICS Professor Chen Li.

PSearch allows users to enter whatever information they may happen to have (first name, last name, department, phone number, etc.) and PSearch will offer any entries in the campus phone directory which match.  PSearch is error tolerant (you can find people with only an approximation of the spelling of a name) and real time (results are displayed and refined as you enter information.)

PSearch represents a collaboration between NACS and ICS.  Professor Li’s team offered the intelligent database search technology, and NACS offered the data and our user-interface experience.  Key contributors on Professor Li’s team include PhD student Rares Vernica at UCI and Guoliang Li, a visiting researcher from Tsinghua University, China.

PSearch is only one potential use of Dr. Li’s “type-ahead search” technology featured on his TASTIER project web page.  Future uses may involve other campus-wide or even UC-wide data sets.  This new technology makes it possible to simultaneously support full-text (google), quick-link, and directory searches in a single query as exhibited by the search box on the ICS home page.

Application Development for DUE

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DUE logo

The mission of the DUE-IT Application and Database Development Team within NACS is to build and support applications and databases for the Division of Undergraduate Education. One such program is Student Academic Advancement Services (SAAS). SAAS works to increase the academic success of key student populations and receives funding from the US Department of Education (USED).  Accordingly, it has considerable data collection and reporting requirements.

NACS has helped SAAS staff to consolidate nearly a decade’s worth of program data by building a new Microsoft ASP.NET application to collect and track how students utilize SAAS services, by recruiting a student reporting specialist, and by providing extensive support in its annual reporting efforts. The Director of SAAS, Joe Maestas, had this to say about NACS’s assistance with last year’s federal reporting efforts:

I was extemely pleased with the ease and professionalism that the folks at NACS handled a very difficult and complex task.  Our reporting requirement to the USED is a monstrous task which has always caused us problems due to the size and complexity of the database and report requirements.  After John and Kenny’s help I no longer worry about getting it done.  We now get this baby put to bed early, and we are notified that there is no need for corrections. Makes us look good with the USED folks.

The new ASP.NET-based Student Tracking system supplanted a less cohesive array of Microsoft Access, Excel, and paper-based data-collection tools, eliminated duplication of effort in data collection, and improved the quality of collected data by adding a layer of data validation that did not exist beforehand.

New on EEE: SignupSheet Timeslots

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The Electronic Educational Environment (EEE) web team has revised the SignupSheet tool, which now supports automatically-generated timeslots. Rather than manually entering each timeslot, instructors and assistants can generate a set of timeslots by entering the following information:

  • Label
  • Time range
  • Date (or day of the week)
  • Number of timeslots (or length of each timeslot, which will then determine the number of timeslots offered)
  • Gap between each timeslot
  • Number of signups to allow per timeslot
SignupSheet timeslot generator

SignupSheet will automatically create each of the signup items based on the entered parameters.

The new timeslot option makes it easier for instructors and assistants to schedule appointments during office hours, presentations, review sessions, or exam times.

More information can be found on the SignupSheet Help web page.

Course Management System for University Extension

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NACS and UCI Extension have teamed up to enable UCI Extension courses to use the Moodle course management system, available at http://learn.uci.edu/ .

This new capability was made possible through “single sign-on,” a technology that allows students to move seamlessly among websites which, by sharing login and other information, eliminate the need to sign-in multiple times.

Extension students use their Extension login to register and pay for classes. They can then move into the Moodle online learning environment hosted at NACS. Once classes begin, students see their classes immediately and can start participating in online discussions and view media-rich course materials. All authentication and student enrollment information are exchanged in real-time behind the scenes.

Jill James, Director of University Extension Information Systems praised the partnership’s success. “NACS’s project management help, technical expertise, and support are fantastic and ensured a very successful launch. As the Distance Learning Center expands, the new automation helps streamline the process of creating courses and linking students.”

The partnership between NACS and UnEx’s Distance Learning Center has served as a model for on-campus IT “in-sourcing” since 2002. NACS provides the IT expertise, infrastructure, and on-call emergency response necessary to host a Moodle site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This allows the Distance Learning Center to focus attention on their unique contribution on campus: top-notch distance learning education.